See this book? You must read it. Immediately. Why?
It's not often that a book can be innovative with language, structurally clever and engaging all at the same time. "The God of Small Things" skips and hops (a little like two-egg twins are wont to do) through the story of an Indian family as they encounter a series of escalating disasters. Early into the book, you already know what will happen, but Roy will keep you hooked, wondering how it all fits together.
As Roy says herself on p229, "The great stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. they don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again."
And though this whole paragraph is as pretentious as an uncalled-for Shakespeare reference, there is a lot of truth to it. Every single time I watch Romeo and Juliet, I have to physically hold myself back from grabbing his pretty little jaw, turning it towards the awakening damsel and yelling loudly 'for god's sake man, just wait a minute longer!'
Everyone has there special list of books which are so familiar and enjoyable that they can be started on any random page. Those 'Great Stories', which aren't always 'High Literature', speak to you personally, communicating something unique to the book and unique to you. Here is my list:
For "The God of Small Things", the clincher (apart from the epic word play, surreal imagery, outrageously-captivating story and valuable characters; evidently there is a fair amount of awesome in this book) to making this read truly worthwhile are the insights into human behaviour. To me, it is the descriptions where a literary situation becomes emblematic for a self-experienced moment, culminating in a fresh understanding, which makes a work momentous. It's these moments which make an author relevant to the reader.
This is my favourite such moment from "The God of Small Things". The three children have dressed up as fancy ladies, and visited their adult friend. He, Velutha, pretends not to recognise them:
"They visited him in saris, clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass... and introduced themselves as Mrs Pillai, Mrs Eapen and Mrs Rajagopalan. Velutha introduced himself and his paralysed brother... He chatted to them about the weather. The river. The fact that in his opinion coconut trees were getting shorter by the year. As were the ladies in Ayemenem. He introduced them to his surly hen. He showed them his carpentary tools, and whittled them each a wooden spoon.
"It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight, recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection.
"It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.
"To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do."
This bit also shows how clever Roy is with her tense and structure. The flashbacks occur simultaneously with other sections of the timeline, creating a flood of memories, thoughts, images jumbled together in some kind of fabulous plot risotto or omelette or... God, it's just so amazing.
I will say no more.
Instead, look at these flickr images based on the book! Yay!
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